[CentOS-docs] A Question of Style

Wed Dec 24 00:53:03 UTC 2014
Brian Stinson <bstinson at ksu.edu>

On Dec 23 16:29, PatrickD Garvey wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 12/23/2014 03:56 PM, Yves Bellefeuille wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 23 December 2014, PatrickD Garvey
> > > <patrickdgarveyt at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> In
> > >> http://wiki.centos.org/Contribute#head-42b3d8e26400a106851a61aebe5c2c
> > >>
> > >>
> > ca54dd79e5 the standard for the wiki username is established as
> > >> FirstnameLastname.
> > >>
> > >> In http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Centpkg, created and edited by
> > >> BrianStinson, the Community Build System username is shown as
> > >> bstinson
> > >
> > > If I understand your question correctly, your name as a wiki
> > > *author* is FirstnameLastname.
> > >
> > > When giving examples of commands, output, etc., you can use
> > > whatever you want. Sometimes you have to use the user "root" in an
> > > example.
> >
> > In other words, one can choose whatever username is preferred for
> > community systems such as git.centos.org and cbs.centos.org -- for
> > example, my commmunity username is always 'quaid' (when I can obtain
> > it.) But the wiki stands alone in requesting that document authors use
> > a "real name", i.e., FirstnameLastname of the autheor. E.g., my
> > username on wiki.centos.org is KarstenWade. The same is true for all
> > other project members that I have seen.
> >
> > FWIW, I don't follow this practice in other locations. For example, on
> > the Fedora Wiki I am 'Quaid' and on Wikipedia I am 'iquaid', the
> > latter being my preference when straight 'quaid' is not available to me.
> >
> > The FirstnameLastname preference for the CentOS wiki is a bit of
> > legacy, and makes sense to follow simply for that reason unless there
> > is a better reason to change it.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > - Karsten
> 
> 
> I'm not referring to the username used by a particular person while using a
> CentOS community resource. I'm trying to understand if the document example
> should use an actual person's username (a security risk increase. That's
> half that person's credentials.) or a pattern that refers to no one, such
> as "username".

I could be convinced that generalizing to 'username' might be less
confusing (although my opinion is the opposite, I find real-world
examples to be more illustrative). In that particular case the important
distinction is between the UNIX superuser account and a normal user
account (that happens to be configured with my cbs credentials). If
there's a way to make that more clear, I'm happy to update. 

I don't, however, buy the "security risk" argument simply because it's
an open buildsystem, user IDs are already public in many more ways than
in the documentation. 

Cheers!
Brian